The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Event messages sent by network devices are an important source of information for management systems, including network monitoring applications. The messages allow for event-driven management, which is notifying management applications of occurrences in the network so that the application can then react to in a timely fashion. Syslog messages are an important category of such event messages.
In some cases, the rate at which events can be emitted by a device may be constrained. The actual rate at which event messages are generated within the device may at times be significantly higher that the rate at which the messages may be sent; for example, in the case of high-density devices and/or in the case of outages that result in message storms. This could lead to a situation in which a large backlog of messages builds up inside the device. A large backlog of messages inside a device creates significant problems. For example, if the backlog causes the message buffer in the device to overflow, messages will be dropped. In the case of Syslog messages, the logger queue may become overloaded, resulting in dropped messages.